TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Mark, I think you're a little bit unfair regarding Structured FrameMaker.
===================Structured Frame is a document domain structured writing systems.
===================
As far as I can tell, any markup that supports what you're describing as subject domain structure would look a lot like SGML back in the day. For those young enough to think ML always began with X or HT, SGML stands for Standard Generalized markup language. (Although there were people who claimed it stood for Sounds Great Maybe Later.) The idea was to express a declarative GRAMMAR (not a language), and that grammar could be used to declare AND ENFORCE any language that could describe... Well... The structure of a subject domain.Â
You might say that SGML is merely a document domain language. In that case, it would help to understand your point if you could distinguish how SGML falls short of what you're describing.
Back to Structured FrameMaker... That was implemented to support SGML, and it still does BTW. You can argue the success of that implementation, but I think it was pretty good -- tables and footnotes being weak spots. So, if SGML can express a subject domain, then certainly the INTENT of Struct Maker was to support subject domains. And the success of that intent would map to its success at supporting SGML. (Note that you can use Struct Maker without ever using ML of any kind. I did a job for a world famous parliament that uses Struct Maker to express the subject domain of bills and amendments to bills, and then automatically merges amendments into the initial draft. They use Structured Maker for the meta data of the structure, but never need XML or SGML.)
BTW, I think you can say the same about other XML and SGML authoring tools. For example, oXygen supports any domain you wish to declare, and you can implement a forms interface to impose that support.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Visit TechWhirl for the latest on content technology, content strategy and content development | http://techwhirl.com